WEST JORDAN, Utah (AP) – Tumbleweeds are a nuisance, an eyesore or even a curse to many residents in the West. And there are those who find them to be comically absurd.
To a West Jordan man, though, tumbleweeds are big business.
Mike Rigby may not love the rolling, prickly weeds that most people try to avoid. But he’s found they’re good for his bottom-line: He can sell them for up to $40 apiece.
“It started as a joke,” said Rigby, whose company Curious Country Creations specializes in selling dried plants for decorative purposes. “I didn’t expect to be in this business at all.”
Rigby’s oddball enterprise in a Salt Lake City suburb is only one of many interesting things about a strange and misunderstood symbol of the Old West.
There aren’t many plants that just pick themselves up and head for the hills. But it’s all in a day’s work for a tumbleweed. To motorists, it sometimes seems the highly mobile weeds have minds of their own – and they apparently love playing in traffic.
On a windy day, almost anywhere in the West you can see motorists swerving to avoid the living things leaping out in front of them.
With a whimsical resemblance to the aliens called “Tribbles” in one of the most beloved episodes of the original “Star Trek” TV series, they strike many people as having a comic personality.
In home videos posted on YouTube, images of traveling tumbleweeds are often accompanied by hysterical laughter as motorists thread their way through onslaughts of unattached bushes that seem determined to cross the road.
Even when the wind stops blowing, the dried bushes are a familiar sight as they clutter ditches and fences. When a wildfire gets going, tumbleweeds can add to the excitement – and the danger – fueling “firenadoes” that can spread the flames far and wide.
More than once, tumbleweeds have been reimagined by filmmakers as monsters, as in a mock trailer on YouTube called “Attack of the Killer Tumbleweeds!”
And yet there are many willing buyers, and at least one willing seller.
Rigby put his first tumbleweed up for sale as part of a school assignment to start a business on the Internet. It took six months to sell the first one. But somehow, tumbleweeds began to catch on.
Curious Country Creations now has four employees who ship out 500 kinds of dried plant decorations. Tumbleweeds are still a mainstay of the business, even at prices as high as $40 each. They are purchased largely as decorations by people and companies looking to give their displays that Old West look.
“Sometimes we have, like, Ralph Lauren or Saks Fifth Avenue come in and buy a tumbleweed, like, three or four for each one of their storefronts,” Rigby said. “We had a tumbleweed on ‘Arrested Development.’”
